Tuesday, June 9, 2015

First Listen> Woody Pines NEW single Make It To The Woods

Any encounter with Woody Pines the feeling of kinship and friendship is immediate whether, on Instagram, twitter or listening to his music, it's intimate, we're occupying the same familiar space.

A virtual front porch with a rocking chair an old dog and Woody's music become a shared experience. Tall tales are swapped, the whiskey bottle is passed around and good times abound.

It's roots music, the music of the Appalachia mountains amplified across valleys and streams to new audiences it's a bonding experience of past and present you don't have to have lived, to connect to.

Woody's music reconnects me to my Grandfather, a coal miner, a proud hillbilly from Pennsylvania who my earliest memories are of waiting to hear his yodel indicating he was on his way home leaving the smell of my Grandmothers bread in the oven I'd take off through the woods with his harmonica tucked in a pocket hoping to coax a song or two out of him on our walk home.Simpler times from this distance looking back as we tend to romanticize the past.

Listen to the new single 'Make It To The Woods' (originally from The Mississippi Sheiks)

His excellent new self-titled release Woody Pines released May 28 on underground label Muddy Roots RecordingsIf you’re wondering where the music of Nashville troubadour Woody Pines comes from, look to the streets. It was on the streets as a professional busker that Woody first cut his teeth, drawing liberally from the lost back alley anthems and scratchy old 78s of American roots music, whether country blues, jugband, hokum, or hillbilly. Heavy rollicking street performances are the key to some of today’s best roots bands, like Old Crow Medicine Show (Woody and OCMS’ Gill Landry used to tour the country in their own jugband), and they’re the key to Woody’s intensely catchy rhythms, jumpy lyrics, and wildly delirious sense of fun. Woody traveled all over the streets of this country, road testing his songs, drawing from the catchiest elements of the music he loved and adding in hopped-up vintage electrification to get that old country dancehall sound down right. That’s why the songs on his new self-titled release Woody Pines (released May 28 on underground label Muddy Roots Recordings) are so hot. This is gonzo folk music, the kind of raise-the-rafters, boot-shakin’ jump blues that used to be banging out of juke joints all over the South in the late 1940s, but now it’s burning into the earholes of a younger generation of Nashville kids, all looking for music with deep roots and something to hang on to.